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The earliest examples of the Christian theme based plays were the Mystery

plays. These plays were based on the Biblical stories. Initially they were

performed in the Churches but later masses adopted them and even the non-clergy

sects started participating in it. The secular element in Christian drama increased

and the groups began performing these plays in lingua franca. By late 13th and

early 14th century, these plays were taken out of the churches entirely. These

religious parlance dramatic representations went into the supervision of the

guilds. Each guild held the responsibility of a specific part of scriptural history. It

was from the guilds that the name Mystery play was originated. The source of the

word lies in Latin mysterium. These mystery plays metamorphosed in to a kind

of plays regarding the vital incidents in Christian Calendar, beginning from the

time of creation to the Judgment day. The tradition of acting these plays in

succession in festive days was conventional in Europe by the later 15th century.

By that time, another form of Christian drama came into existence. It was called

the Morality play. They were like allegories in which the characters had to face

personifications of several moral attributes. The purpose of these Morality plays

was to give confidence to people to remain with the virtues and abstain from

committing vices. Again, preaching the audience about God sin and suffering.

With the Puritan revival of the 17th century, drama took a backseat among all

the literary genres and Church made efforts to suppress its practice and

production. In twentieth century, the evangelical churches played a great role

in revitalizing the style of creating and producing Christian drama. In early 20th

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century England, it was considered illegitimate for a person to play a divine

character on stage. This largely restrained the scope of Christian theme based

drama. A revolutionary Christian theme based drama that is considered, as an

asset of English literature is T.S. Eliot‘s Murder in the Cathedral. It explored the

aspects like sacrifice and martyrdom. Infact all the dramas that Eliot wrote are full

of deep seriousness for religion and spiritualism. All of them teach to adhere to

virtues and work upon how to avoid vices. Eliot understood that being a Christian

he could work on the themes of martyrdom for sainthood and sacrifice and

penance to attain salvation. As we find that salvation is not only the Christian

concept but we can observe it in the eastern religions too and since Eliot himself

was having keen interest and knowledge about it his work can be understood in

the beam of Indian philosophy too. Murder in the Cathedral got published in

1935. In 1939, came his next play The Family Reunion. In 1949, he did The

cocktail party, in 1953, came his The Confidential clerk and In 1958, he wrote

The Elder Statesman.

All of his plays were richly colored in the Biblical shade and he seemed

to be always appealing the human kind to realize the death and life after

death, the eternal abode to heaven. Once again propagating the Christian

teaching. In Murder in the Cathedral, he chose to retell the inner conflict of

Becket to win over temptations and be a martyr by losing "his will in the will

of God". The Family Reunion, on the other hand, deals with the guilt

complex of the protagonist, while The Cocktail Party examines personal

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inadequacies of married life in the modern context. These plays demonstrate

religion as the ultimate meaning of human existence, leading people "to think

in Christian categories with Hindu influences.

5.1

Murder in the Cathedral and the Biblical Martyrdom and Sainthood

Eliot tried too much with Thomas especially under the Biblical influence of

temptation, overcoming of temptation and the martyrdom. The two aspects of the

Murder in the Cathedral are highly Biblical and Liturgical. One is the sermon

delivered by the archbishop, which is the same as that of the sermon delivered in the

liturgical service of Christmas in the midnight mass of the 24 and 25 of December,

and the other is the theme of the martyrdom, which is the message of the Good

Friday. Hence, we can find both the seasons of the advent and the lent here. Thomas

Beckett is in the same glory as that of the Christ in his glory of the resurrection and

the Second Coming; hence, he is the martyr in glory after his death. Hoping for the

holy week, the week of the passion like that of Easter.

Eliot once again giving the reference to martyrdom and emphasizing that glory

comes within the suffering and from the suffering, as says the Holy Bible too. The

following quotations very clearly show the Biblical impact in the Murder in the

Cathedral ….a Christian martyrdom is no accident…...still less is a Christian

martyrdom the effect of a man‘s will to become a saint….a martyr. a saint, is always

made by the design of God…‖ 1 ―Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the birth

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and in passion of our lord; so also, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of the

martyrs.‘

This quotation too defines the mystery of faith - the birth and the death and the rebirth

- the incarnation of the lord on earth for the well-being of the humanity. This is seen

in Hinduism also when we talk of lord Krishna, lord Rama.

On the first level, Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral is all about the dangers of

temptations faced by Becket on the path to attain sainthood. Thomas Becket resisted

several temptations together with cajolery and threat. He got offer to return to

political power alongside King Henry, at the same time he had been accused of

treachery to the state and his priestly youth with his friend king Henry, is at

simultaneous risk of being over and done . Throughout Murder in the Cathedral,

Thomas is warned about the danger of his remaining in Canterbury and the threat of

danger from his enemies, who look forward to please King Henry by murdering him.

Before he enters, the Chorus begs,"0 Thomas return, Archbishop; return, return to

France," for he comes "bringing death into Canterbury"; when he does arrive, Thomas

tells them and the three Priests that none should fear his possible death, for "the

hungry hawk Will only soar and hover" until there is an "End" that will be "simple,

sudden, God-given." The very fact of his return suggests Thomas's refusal to fear

death and belief that God will decide whether he will live or die: as he tells the

Priests, "All things prepare the event." This is the Biblical belief of a true follower of

Christianity. Though tempted by sainthood and lured by clout, Thomas sees

martyrdom and pleasure as human weaknesses. He compares his martyrdom with that

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of the great martyr whose rule is still there as they are worshipped and praised. Here

it can be said that he was lured by the martyrdom of Jesus too. To the tempters he

responds with those famous words:

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain;

Temptation shall not come in this kind again.

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason. [MC 44]

The primary theme shows that it is a sin to seek Martyrdom. A martyr is born, per

the will of God. A true martyr never wishes to be a martyr or acts to become one, but

gives up his life to God with total surrender of his will. Thomas Becket becomes

conscious that the solitary reason of his life is to be a martyr as per God‘s will and the

secondary theme is that life is full of temptations: the temptation of the luxurious life,

the temptation of power etc.The disposition of the play is completely somber and

sad, with a constant trace of impending tragedy throughout.The Bible says that

martyrdom is the suffering and even death of the one who spreads the word of the

lord. The dictionary defines ―martyrdom‖ as ―the death or suffering of a martyr.‖ In

addition, the definition of a martyr is ―a person who is killed because of their

religious or other beliefs.‖ The English word ―martyr‖ is originally a word

transliterated from the Greek martur, which simply means ―witness.‖ This became

synonymous with dying for one‘s religious beliefs because the early Christian

witnesses were persecuted and killed for their witness. All those who had spread the

word of the lord suffered through the hands of the atheists.

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The first Christian martyr, Stephen is mentioned in the book of Acts chapter 7.2

Stephen‘s story begins in Acts 6:8. After being anointed as one of the first deacons in

the church, Stephen immediately begins doing mighty works among the people. As is

usually the case when the Holy Spirit is mightily at work and the gospel is going

forth, the forces of darkness arise to hinder the work of the kingdom. In this case,

several men came in to dispute what Stephen was saying, but Stephen, filled with the

Holy Spirit, was able to refute their disputations. Rather than accept what Stephen

was teaching, these men bring false charges against Stephen to the Jewish leaders

Acts 6:11-14.3

When questioned about these charges, Stephen begins to ‗witness‘ to

the assembled Jewish leaders. Most of Acts 7 consists of a speech which Stephen

gives to the Jewish leaders in which he essentially summarizes the history of Israel up

until the point where they rejected the Messiah. Here we can compare the character of

Thomas Becket with Stephen in religious creed. At the end of the speech, Stephen

utters these words, which seal his fate.

Clearly the Biblical evidence points to the fact that those who are persecuted and

suffer for their witness to Christ up to death are pleasing in the sight of God. This is

described as one of the temptations of Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral.

Becket believed that God does not call everyone to make the ultimate sacrifice. That

privilege is o given to those whom God chooses to give that privilege. This was the

satisfaction in the heart and soul of Thomas Becket. The bible calls all Christians to

be prepared to give a defense of the hope that lies within us.4 This concept holds a

major part of Becket‘s psychology to be a martyr. Thus, holds a Christian material as

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the major theme of the drama. We are in a state of ‗warfare‘ 5 and our Lord may call

upon anyone of us to witness and even be martyred for our faith. Thus, we must be

prepared similar to a defence personnel who can be called at any time into the battle

as a part of their job. Martyrdom is a special status in the eyes of the God. We must

have faith in the biblical teachings to avoid martyrdom. Martyrdom is a great

privilege if it cannot be avoided, but it is not to be sought. Jesus said in that same

passage in Matthew 10, ―When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next‖6

But

should try to avoid it. The book of Acts shows that the early church continually fled

from intense persecution (e.g., Acts 8:1; 9:25, 30; 14:6; 17:10, 14). In each of these

biblical examples, we see the early Christians fleeing persecution and taking all

necessary precautions for survival. When Jesus says, ―Whoever finds his life will lose

it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it‖ [MATHEW 10:3]

he is not

calling for people to actively lose their lives. Instead, it is a call to be willing to lose

one‘s life for his sake. Although those who actively seek the path of martyrdom are

not seeking it for the glory of God, but for their own glory. As the old saying goes,

the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. God‘s purpose in martyrdom is the

glorification of his name and the building up of his church. Becket was well aware of

this and he fled for survival and later surrendered himself to death trying to prove that

he has a call from the lord. Thus making the play purely Biblical. Eliot‘s drama is

colored in Christianity, the Gospel and the Bible. For Eliot‘s tragedies, it can be

rightly said as Reinhold Neibuhr: Christianity is a religion that transcends

tragedy…The holy cross is not tragic but the resolution of tragedy. Christians believe

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in the efficiency of the incarnation and resurrection and the redemption; that the

hegemony of the devil was destroyed finally. The Gordian knot has been cut. Tragic

sense has been associated with Christianity martyrdom of Jesus and tragic vision

belongs to different schools of philosophies. The martyrdom of Thomas Beckett in

Murder in the Cathedral is similar to the martyrdom of Jesus it is also influenced by

the Bible. It has liturgical material employed in it: - the introits and versicles for the

three days after the Christmas. It includes the concept of incarnation and advent too.

The Dies Iray; The Deum; and most of all in the contrast between the ideals of

sanctity, which is at the centre, and the reality of the expression of common

unsanctified humanity out of which both poems and the plays arise.

In Christianity, Jesus Christ did not literally kill Satan. Following the sacrificial

system of the Old Testament, Jesus let himself was crucified for the sake of humanity.

This was the "gift of God"7

as ransom for our sins, a chance offered to us to be set

free from the power of Satan and sin. According to the Bible, the final destruction of

demons' power will only occur at the judgment day. That was what Becket intended

to do, giving away his life for the good of man and church. In the Christian liturgy,

also there is a prayer that states that lord let me receive this sacrifice for the good of

all his church. Murder in the Cathedral is essentially an extended lyrical

consideration of the proper residence of temporal and religious power, of the

obligation of religious believers to the commands of the State, and of the possibility

that faithfulness can be selfish unto offense. Beckett is one of the most interesting

characters from history. Rising from a lowly birth in the cheap side section of

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London, largely thanks to the patronage of Theobald. Archbishop of Canterbury, in

1154 he became both archdeacon of Canterbury and Henry's chancellor. Theobald

expected him to defend the prerogative of the Church, but instead he became friends

with Henry, and unlimited the power of the State at the cost of the values of the

Church. So when Theobald was succeeded by Beckett, Henry expected to have a

submissively administering the Church, but in its place Beckett chose an austere

lifestyle and became a fearsome defender of the rights of the Church. After dividing

on many minor issues, matters came to a head when Henry tried to exert the power of

Crown courts to penalize clerics who had been convicted by church. Henry was

gritty to reign him in, put Beckett on trial for misappropriating funds while serving as

Chancellor, and Beckett was required to flee to France.

Henry‘s aim was the overthrow of the feudal system, unknowingly paving the way

for the role of the bourgeoisie and free enterprise and making him an active link in

Marx‘s historical dialectic. To achieve that he had to control the Church by

combining under the crown of England both State and Church. Neither Becket nor the

faith could stand in his way. He did not eliminate the Church; he absorbed it and used

it. For the similar reasons modern political leaders of West and East use it, wrapping

themselves in religious language and religious issues—our Christian values, our

Christian heritage and God is on our side. Seven years later, after an apparent

reconciliation with his old friend Henry, he returned to England only to be murdered

in his Canterbury cathedral by four of Henry‘s knights. The entire story contains

Biblical allusions regarding martyrdom and sainthood.

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In the opening scene, the women allude to the passage of time-"Since golden

October declined into somber November."-but state also, "The New Year waits,

breathes, waits."[MC 11] Dramatically speaking, time seems to have stopped; the

"wheel" to use one of the play's dominant images has ceased turning. This impression

of time having stopped probably serves to dramatize the nature of the events about to

transpire as a turning point: as the women say, "destiny waits for the coming". [MC

12] As they put it, the women have been "living and partly living". [MC 19] In

Becket's absence, they have endured seven years of "oppression and luxury. Poverty

and license." and a host of other dichotomies; but now that seemingly endless,

cyclical repetition of life's extremities, as well as the mundane existence in between

them, is about to end. It is about to be interrupted. In a sense, it has finished; readers

may note the ancient, symbolic connotations of the number seven as a number of

completion, even of divine wholeness e.g., the completion of creation in seven days

according to Genesis 1; the ancient and medieval designation of the "sevenfold" gifts

of the Holy Spirit from8

The old way of "living and partly living," then, has ended-a

conclusion the women are neither entirely comfortable nor overly happy about: as

they lament, "We do not wish anything to happen. A great fear is upon us. A fear like

birth and death".[MC 19-20] Because the women do not "wish anything to happen,"

they are loathing leaving behind their half-existence in which nothing, in fact,

actually happened-in which they were simply turned upon the wheel they describe.

Becket's return threatens to upset the status quo-a common motif in the Christian

tradition, out of which Eliot wrote, following his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in

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1927. For example, consider the apostle Paul's apocalyptic conviction that, because of

the Resurrection of Jesus, "the present form of this world is passing away".9

The imminent end of their world's present form creates a crisis of anxiety for the

Canterbury women. "We are content," they say, "if we are left alone". They go so far,

in their second major speech, to plead with Becket: "O Thomas, return, Archbishop;

return, return"-but not the expected plea of returning to Canterbury-"return to

France".[MC 18] The chorus thus expresses a common psychological reality: it is

often easier to suffer under a known but unsatisfactory set of circumstances than to

risk venturing into a new and potentially more satisfactory but unknown set. It is

often easier to remain in the past than to move forward into the future. "Now I fear

disturbance of the quiet seasons."

In another sense, it may be accurate to say that the play's first act is set, not in

ordinary time, but in liturgical time. Indeed, the text very quickly foregrounds the

Christian calendar in the audience's mind, with a reference to All Hallows , the feast

day on which all saints and martyrs, known or unknown, are celebrated. Becket's

impending arrival represents a break in time, a rupture in history and, significantly,

this first act is set during early December, what is in the Christian liturgical calendar

the season of Advent from the Latin adventus, "coming" or "arrival", during which

waiting for the second coming of Christ is a dominant focus. Traditionally, then,

Advent is a season for waiting: "Concerned with the Four Last Things i.e., Christ's

second coming, the Day of Judgment, heaven, and hell], Advent prepares for the

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Parousia i.e., the Second Coming, as well as for Christmas".10

And while Christians

are enjoined to observe Advent with both penitence and expectancy, the Canterbury

women observe Becket's "advent" with only dread. In either case, however-whether

set in ecclesiastical-theological time or outside of time altogether-the play begins with

an undeniable establishment of temporal stillness: "The New Year waits, destiny

waits for the coming." Further potential allusions to Advent occur in the Messenger's

first speech, as he urges the three priests to "prepare to meet" the returning

archbishop.[MC 15] Given that the word "angel" derives from the Greek word for

"messenger," one might even view the Messenger's speech as an "annunciation" of

sorts, preparing the world to meet a coming savior.

The conversation among the three priests prior to Becket's return introduces a

contrast between the temporal realm and the spiritual realm. For example, the third

priest criticizes temporal authorities noticing the chorus' words, "Kings Rule or

baron‘s rule" for governing by "violence, duplicity and frequent malversation".[MC

14] They obey only the law of brute force; in contrast, the first priest speculates that

Becket returns with the confidence of "the power of Rome[i.e., the Roman Catholic

Church], the spiritual rule, the assurance of right, and the love of the people". In

short, the temporal realm is equated with force; the spiritual, with love. The priests'

conversation also raises the question of whether true peace can ever be found between

these two realms: "What peace can be found to grow between the hammer and the

anvil?" Such "patched up" reconciliation as does exist between the archbishop and the

king is "peace, but not the kiss of peace".[MC 16] In other words, it is more of an

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uneasy, mutual co-existence or toleration than an actual cessation of hostilities and

restoration of relationship. Becket's own life, of course, ended because of the

conflicting, competing interests of the temporal and spiritual realms; thus, Eliot's play

sounds this theme early on, alerting the audience of the central conflict to come.

The conversation among the priests also raises a second central question: Is

Thomas Becket a proud man. In addition, if so, in what sense? The first priest claims

that Becket was proud as secular chancellor, and is still proud as spiritual archbishop.

Pride has, the priest says, been a constant in Becket's character, whether he held

temporal or spiritual office, for it was "pride always feeding upon [Becket's] own

virtues, / Pride drawing sustenance from impartiality, / Pride drawing sustenance

from generosity".[MC 17] The priest ties together the themes of temporal versus

spiritual power and pride when he states that Becket has always wanted to be in

"subjection to God alone." Is such dedication a form of pride in itself? Should one

aspire to be completely free of the temporal realm in order to live entirely in the

spiritual? Of course, such questions' validity depends upon the validity of the priest's

assessment of Becket's character, issue readers can only decide for themselves as the

play unfolds. The Chorus' second major speech is an ironic plea for Thomas' return:

they wish him to return to France instead of Canterbury, for they fear turmoil in the

world they have known, even though it is but a world of "living and partly

living".[MC 19] They state they have existed in this limbo for seven years-more than

a straightforward temporal reference, the number seven, which commonly signifies

completeness and wholeness in religion and mysticism, the number seven may here

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mean that the time allotted for this quasi-life has reached its end; Becket's return will,

as the Third Priest says, "for good or ill, let the wheel turn". For an audience versed

in the Bible, the women's speech at this point may evoke the book of Ecclesiastes,

with its famous passage on the cyclical nature of time: "For everything there is a

season, and a time for every matter under heaven".11

The writer of Ecclesiastes

traditionally identified as King Solomon, but in the text identified only as Qohelet,

"the Teacher," 1:1 and passim. points to a series of antitheses to support his thesis that

"there is nothing new under the sun" (1:9): he recites a litany of "a time to be born,

and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted," and so forth

(see 3:2-8). The Teacher wishes to be freed from this "wheel" of time (not his phrase,

but Eliot's), because he sees it as, in effect, a curse upon humanity: God, Qohelet

declares, "has put a sense of past and future into [human beings'] minds, yet they

cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end" (3:11). In other

words, God implants a sense of temporality in humanity, and then frustrates human

desires to make sense of temporality. The Canterbury women, however, in contrast,

long for no such resolution. As does Qohelet, the women intone a litany of antitheses-

e.g., "Sometimes the corn has failed us, / Sometimes the harvest is good, / One year is

a year of rain, / Another a year of dryness" (p. 19)-thus demonstrating that they share

the common human experience of sensing temporality. When an event looms,

however, that could potentially serve as a moment that reveals the "pattern of

time‖[MC 13] , they reject it. They do not wish to know, as Qohelet says, "what God

has done." Instead, they implore Thomas to go away, for he brings a "doom on the

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house, a doom on [himself], a doom on the world".In this speech, the word "doom"

may carry overtones not only of a disastrous end but also of the word's medieval

definition of "fate," good or ill. Becket's arrival in Canterbury is, as the women

rightly perceive, the arrival of nothing less than fate itself; yet it is an arrival they

reject, preferring instead to go on "living and partly living."

From Becket's first entrance, Eliot begins developing him as not only a Christ-

figure in general but also as an analogy of Jesus Christ himself. Priests do, of course,

physically represent or "stand in for" Jesus in many Christian traditions; so Becket is

a Christ-figure in that sense already. But Eliot wishes to draw tighter parallels.

Becket's first spoken word, for instance, is "Peace" (p. 21)-a greeting Jesus commonly

uses in the gospel narratives, especially after his Resurrection.12

Ironically, however,

Jesus used this greeting to allay his followers' fears, but Becket can be seen as

confirming the fears of those who follow him: like the women, he realizes that his

return will initiate suffering. This suffering, however, is necessary-even as Jesus'

suffering was "necessary". Becket's suffering, like Jesus', will have a salvific

dimension: it will allow "the wheel"-the order, the pattern of life-to "turn and still / Be

forever still".[MC 22] This difficult, statement may mean that, whereas Canterbury,

as symbolized in its women, has been stagnant for the past seven years, stuck in a

"peace" that really is no peace, Becket's impending suffering and death will move

Canterbury and its inhabitants to a new state of being-i.e., Becket's death will cause

the wheel to turn-and yet this new state of being truly will be peace. The mere fact

that Becket enters Eliot's drama as one who returns further develops the characters as

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a Christ-figure; cf. this commentary's previous discussion of Advent as a time of

preparation for Jesus' Parousia, or "second coming." Note also the Second Priest's

protestation, "Forgive us, my Lord, you would have had a better welcome / If we had

been sooner prepared for the event". Becket's rooms have not been made ready, even

though the priest promises he will make them so. This exchange may bring to mind

Jesus' parables of his own return: for example, "You also must be ready, for the Son

of Man is coming at an unexpected hour".13

Notably, the phrase "Son of Man" has

already surfaced in Eliot's text, when the Chorus asks, "Shall the Son of Man be born

again in the litter of scorn?‖[MC13] Thus, Eliot has already explicitly invited his

audience to view Becket's return as an eschatological event-that is, an event which

inaugurates the eschaton, the "end times," the "last things." Eschatological events

mark the end of an old world and the birth of a new. By foregrounding biblical

material surrounding the Parousia, Eliot creates the expectation that Becket's

impending suffering and death will be just such an epochal event. The archbishop

himself calls it an "end": "End will be simple, sudden, and God-given" (p. 23). Becket

advises the priests to "watch" for the "consummation" of his story[MC 23] an echo

not only of Jesus' admonitions to his disciples to watch for the last day but also of his

request that the disciples watch with him in Gethsemane prior to his arrest [MC 23], a

time during which Jesus was tempted to abandon his saving mission. Similarly and

appropriately, then, Becket is tempted at this point to abandon his mission. The Four

Tempters who present themselves were intended, Eliot revealed in a prefatory note to

the third edition (1937), to be "doubled" with the roles of the Four Knights; i.e., the

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same actors were to play the parts. The First Tempter calls Becket back to the

hedonistic life he lived while he was King Henry's chancellor: "[S]hall we say that

summer's over / or that the good time cannot last?"[MC 24] Attentive readers and

audience members know that, of course, the summer has long been over (see the

Chorus' words on p. 13, "What shall we do in the heat of summer / But wait in barren

orchards for another October?," words that describe the women's present situation).

Becket cannot retreat into the past, as the Tempter advises him to do. The Tempter

presents a symbolic vision of the passing seasons that is at odds with the scheme

established earlier in the drama: where the Tempter declares that, in the reconciliation

with the king, "Spring has come in winter," bringing rebirth with it. [MC 24] Becket

knows that the vision is but a "springtime fancy"[MC 26] -that is, a fantasy, a fiction,

an illusion-and adheres to the already-established motif of the seasons as markers of a

seemingly endless cycle of barren waiting-a cycle that his impending death will,

however, break. Notably, the First Tempter, like the First Priest [MC 17] , accuses

Becket of pride-specifically, self-righteousness: "You were not used to be so hard

upon sinners / When they were your friends".[MC 25] He brands Becket's principles

as "higher vices / which will have to be paid for at higher prices". In keeping with his

frivolity (his "humble levity"), he departs Becket with an ironic and sarcastic

anticipation of Becket's canonization to come: "If you will remember me, my Lord, at

your prayers, / I'll remember you at kissing-time below the stairs".[MC 24] It is a

mocking allusion to the plea of people who pray for the saints' intercession; Ora pro

nobis -Pray for us. This first temptation has no unambiguous parallel in those faced

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by Jesus, although Jesus was tempted to focus on physical needs when tempted to

turn stones into bread.14

The Second Tempter would have Becket shift from pursuing and using spiritual to

temporal power: "You, master of policy / Whom all acknowledged, should guide the

state again"[MC 27] He thus reintroduces the conflict between temporal and spiritual

power into the play. He argues that only power matters, not "holiness," because

power can shape the world today, not in some "hereafter".[MC 27] This argument has

some appeal to Becket because he has been established as the champion of the lowly;

the Tempter tells Becket that he could again use the power of the chancellorship to

"set down the great, protect the poor, / Beneath the throne of God can man do

more?".[MC 28] The Tempter thus invokes the old, morally fallacious argument that

ends justify means. As Becket moves closer to falling into the Tempter's trap, the

Tempter tells him that the price of such power is the "pretence of priestly power"-he

would have to give up his claims as archbishop to spiritual authority. Only in so doing

will Becket receive "the power and the glory"[MC 29] -a phrase from the traditional,

doxological conclusion of the Lord's Prayer: "For thine is the kingdom and the power

and the glory forever." These words have the effect of jolting Becket out of his near-

submission to the Tempter. They serve to remind him of where his true loyalties lie.

They may also be Eliot's echoing of such biblical commentary on the nature of power

as15

"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." Such

"weak" power is the only power Becket has been called to wield, and he will do so in

facing his martyrdom. All worldly power is as nothing compared to the power of

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God, as Becket knows: "Shall I, who keep the keys / Of heaven and hell"a reference

to the power of pardon Jesus grants to the Church.16

Descend to desire a punier

power?"[MC 30] Becket makes clear the distinction between temporal and spiritual

power: it can only guarantee order "as the world knows order"[MC 30] -the

unavoidable implication being that "order" as the world defines it is not true order at

all, just as "peace" as the world defines it is not true peace (see Becket's earlier

greeting of "Peace" as well as Jesus' words in 17

Becket's second temptation has a

clear analogue in Scripture, when the devil tempts Jesus to rule over all the kingdoms

of the earth, in return for worshiping him.18

The Third Tempter styles himself "an unexpected visitor," but Becket claims he

has, in fact, been expected [MC 31][This Tempter tells Becket to betray the king with

whom he has so recently been reconciled: "Other friends / May be found".[MC 33]

But Becket also resists this temptation to expedient friendships on the basis of his

faith: "If the Archbishop cannot trust the Throne"-i.e. if he has cause for fear from the

king which, in fact, he does-" He has good cause to trust none but God alone"[MC

34] This third temptation perhaps parallels the temptation Jesus faced to ally himself

with the common people against the religious leadership by throwing himself from

the Temple 19

but at any event, Becket's repudiation of the temptation echoes Jesus'

repudiation of any help but God in the face of temptation (Matt. 4:10; Luke 5:8). As

have the other tempters, the Third Tempter leaves Becket to his fate, declaring, "I

shall not wait at your door"[MC 34] -an allusion to the depiction of sin in 20

: "Sin is

lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it." At this point, it

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would appear that Becket has done so. The Fourth Tempter comes closest to luring

Becket away from the mission he knows he must fulfill. No doubt his unexpected

arrival accounts for some of his power over Becket-as the Archbishop says, "I

expected / Three visitors, not four"[MC 35] , perhaps because Jesus only wrestled

with three temptations in the Gospel narratives of Matthew and Luke (cited numerous

times above)-but much of this Tempter's near-success must also be attributed to the

fact that he seems closest to being Becket himself. When Becket asks the Tempter's

identity, he does so in a way that indicates this truth: "Who are you, tempting me with

my own desires?"[MC 39] or again, when Becket accuses this last Tempter, "You

only offer / Dreams to damnation," the Tempter responds, "You have often dreamt

them" (p. 40). He even uses Becket's earlier words against him ("You know and do

not know, what is to act or suffer," etc.,[MC 40-41] Thus, the Fourth Tempter would

seem to be Eliot's way of externally dramatizing Becket's inner struggles. The

Tempter strives to persuade Becket to pursue the path of martyrdom, but for

ultimately selfish reasons: for instance, "think of glory after death. Think of pilgrims,

standing in line / Before the glittering jeweled shrine."[MC 37-38] -the last perhaps a

sly reference to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as well as the historical fact of the

multitude of pilgrims who traveled to Canterbury to do homage at Becket's shrine.

"King is forgotten, when another shall come," the Tempter tells Becket; but "Saint

and Martyr rule from the tomb". It is an appeal to a desire to break free of the

"wheel"[MC 37-38] of time itself. This alternative is imagined as Becket, in effect,

canonizing himself: the Tempter asks him the rhetorical question, "What can compare

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with the glory of Saints / Dwelling forever in presence of God?"[MC 39] The

Tempter, in other words, tempts Becket to seize the honor of sainthood for himself.

He wants the archbishop to be proud-to embrace a martyr's fate for an ulterior motive.

Interestingly, to do so would be for Becket to be an anti-Christ figure, as Jesus "did

not regard equality with God as something to be exploited" 21

or "grasped," in other

translations.

The liturgical and Biblical impact

Eliot has included advent liturgy in his play. Becket's sermon reflects a well-

known tradition: "On Christmas day Saint Thomas made a sermon at Canterbury in

his own church, and weeping, prayed the people to pray for him, for he knew well his

time was nigh."24

In connection with this legend about Becket's foreknowledge of his

death, recall the Messenger's comment in Part I: "no one considers it a happy

prognostic".20

As archbishop, it is no doubt certain that Becket preached on Christmas

Day, 1170, and it is even highly probable that Becket did indeed took 25

and the

surrounding verses as his text; it has been, for centuries, the traditionally assigned

reading for the celebration of Christmas. The themes of his sermon in the interlude of

the play serve Eliot's dramatic aims. He was fond of employing readings and prayers

from the catholic liturgy. First, Becket makes much of the fact that Christmas is a

celebration not only of Jesus' birth, but also his death: because of the theology

underlying the Roman Catholic Mass in which there is celebration of eucharist, the

priest offers a "bloodless sacrifice" to God, literally re-presenting the body and blood

of Christ to God under the incidents of the consecrated bread and wine-Becket can

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conclude that "we celebrate at once the Birth of Our Lord and His Passion and Death

upon the Cross"[MC 47] This is purely liturgical derivation. Birth and death coexist

quite closely in the Mass. Becket states that, although "the World" cannot

comprehend such behavior, the Christian community "can rejoice and mourn at once

for the same reason".[MC 48] This emphasis on the proximity of birth and death

serves to help interpret for the play's audience the fact of Becket's death during

Christmastide: Again, that interrupting, apocalyptic event will "for good or ill" set the

"wheel" of history turning once more. It is Becket's death that will, paradoxically,

give birth to a new existence for Canterbury and its people-and, by extension, for the

world itself. Becket's death will enable the world to be born out of the barren limbo of

"living and partly living‖. Second, Eliot uses Becket's sermon to return to an

examination of the relationship usually, one of conflict-between the temporal and the

spiritual. He asks his people attending worship to think about how Jesus spoke of

peace; this portion of the sermon from 26

shows Becket's own initial greeting of peace

upon his return to Canterbury in Part I. Becket denies that Jesus was giving temporal

peace: "the kingdom of England at peace with its neighbours, the barons at peace

with the King.".[MC 48] Rather, Jesus meant a spiritual peace. It is that non-temporal

kind of peace, which Becket's death will bring. His death, a consequence of his not

being at temporal peace with King Henry, will nonetheless result in peace for the

community and the world by fulfilling God's "pattern," by allowing the wheel of fate

to once again turn. Here in God’s will and wheel of time a good blend of Hindu

and Christian philosophy is seen here. Finally, Becket's sermon offers explicit

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definitions of martyrdom. Eliot has the archbishop comment on the fact that the two

days after Christmas Day are, on the Western Christian liturgical calendar, the feast

of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr that Becket reminds his listeners-and, thus,

Eliot informs his audience-that "A Christian martyrdom is never an accident, for

Saints are not made by accident"[MC 49] they are rather by the will of God. Becket

thus implicitly reiterates his rejection of the Fourth Tempter's enticements in Part I,

and reinforces the stubborn division between temporal and spiritual power. He

affirms that the true martyr "has lost his will in the will of God, and. no longer desires

anything for himself, not even the glory of becoming a martyr‖. He then discusses the

educative purposes of martyrdom: "to warn men and to lead them, to bring them back

to God's ways"[MC 49] Eliot again sounding too Biblical. For these three reasons,

Becket‘s sermon offers several interpretive keys to the whole of Eliot's drama. In

keeping with Eliot's presentation of Becket as a Christ-figure, it is notable that Becket

asks his congregation to keep his words "in your hearts" and "think of them at another

time"[MC 50] for it was not until after Jesus' Resurrection that his disciples

remembered and understood his words about his own identity and role in God's

pattern as given in the New Testament.27

Near the close of his sermon, Becket makes

reference to "the blessed Archbishop Elpege".[MC 50] Elphege also spelled Alphege,

and also known as Godwine assumed the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1006. "At

this period England was harassed by the Danes, towards the end of September, 1011,

they sacked and burned Canterbury, made Elphege a prisoner. On 19 April, 1012, at

Greenwich, his captors, drunk with wine, and enraged at ransom being refused, pelted

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Elphege with bones of oxen and stones, till one Thrum dispatched him with an axe.

He is sometimes represented with an axe cleaving his skull." 28

Part II begins with the Chorus' comment upon the progression of time. Even

though the winter solstice has passed, the Chorus feels compelled to ask, "Do the

days begin to lengthen?"[MC 53] If so, they see no evidence of the natural rebirth to

come; as they ask, "What sign of the spring of the year?" If there is to be a spring, it

will be only "a bitter spring", a phrase that may be designed to call to mind, in an

ironic fashion, the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer

writes that pilgrims travel to Becket's shrine at Canterbury "Whan that Aprill with his

shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote."-in other words, when

spring is bringing new life to the earth. The Chorus' speech also invokes Eliot's own

work in his modernist epic poem The Waste Land (1922), which similarly mocks

Chaucer with Eliot's famous declaration, "April is the cruelest month." What makes

this winter so cruel for the Chorus seems to be the realization that another

Christmastide has arrived, and yet there is no "peace upon earth, goodwill among

men‖. Instead, hostility prevails, and it "defiles the world, but death in the Lord

renews it"[MC 53] -perhaps the women's unconscious acknowledgment of the way in

which Becket's impending martyrdom will effect "salvation" for the world. Their talk

of defiling and renewal may also anticipate their cries for the world's cleansing while

the four knights kill the archbishop. As it is believed that Jesus shed his blood for the

good will of men on earth. Hence the chorus tries to compare Becket with Jesus in the

sense of martyrdom. Part II alike Part I it gives basis to the audience in liturgy. The

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priests' procession across the stage mirrors the progression of the days after Christmas

Day that lead to Becket's death. Eliot skillfully draws from the appointed liturgical

readings to highlight his themes of martyrdom and faithful witness to God. The First

Priest sings verses from Psalm 119 on the feast of St. Stephen.29

Is, in its biblical

context, a believer's declaration of intent to rely solely on God's statutes in the face of

persecution? The text thus gives voice to a faithful one who is suffering, and proves

applicable not only to Stephen, the first Christian martyr, but also to Becket. The First

Priest also quotes 30

which is the narration of the moment of Stephen's death in the

New Testament. On the next day, the feast of St. John, the Second Priest quotes from

Psalm 22. 31

is, in its original setting, an expression of faith for the future, a hope that

God will deliver the psalmist from trouble, thus enabling him or her to proclaim

God's greatness in the future among God's people. Thus, this verse serves to point to

Becket's fate after death, as a continuing witness to God. The priest also reads from

the first Epistle of 32

another text about testimony and witness. On the following day,

the Third Priest mingles several different biblical texts: "Out of the mouths of babes"

from 33

-an affirmation that God causes praise to come forth from the mouths of the

vulnerable and innocent, thus "silencing the enemy and the avenger";34

"The blood of

thy saints."; John the Seer's vision of the chorus of the faithful martyrs in heaven in

Revelation "the voice of many waters" and "a new song," Matthew's account of the

slaughter of the innocents 35

which itself cites.36

This constellation of texts serves to

highlight the identity of Becket as a martyr. Further commentary on the nature of

Becket's death emerges by the conflated quotation of Hebrews 5 and John 10 by the

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First Priest. Becket has not presumed to become a martyr, just as Jesus did not

presume to become a high priest 37

but, like a faithful high priest, Becket, as did

Jesus, will be the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. 38

He relegates

it to second importance. The Third Priest asks, "What day is the day that we know

that we hope or fear for?" He then answers his own question: "Every day is the day

we should fear from or hope from. One moment / Weighs like another. Only in

retrospection, selection, / We say, that was the day. The critical moment / That is

always now, and here. Even now, in sordid particulars / The eternal design may

appear"[MC 57] These critical lines speak directly to the play's theme that time must

and can be redeemed, that a kind of life beyond that of "living and partly living" is

possible and necessary. By making his decision to adhere to God's order, Becket will

bring something of that order into the world of the "now and here," enabling the

"wheel" of time to turn, allowing true "peace" to manifest itself in Canterbury,

however brokenly and imperfectly, in "sordid particulars." The speech helps the

play's audience interpret Becket's death as more than an "accident" it is a truly

transcendent act mentioned above. Audiences should note the irony in Eliot's use of

the term "King" when the four knights enter the action, they introduce themselves as

"Servants of the King".[MC 57] Becket himself would claim the same identity, in

reference to God, the King of kings. Eliot thus employs the language of kingship to

further develop his treatment of temporal versus spiritual power, and what quality of

allegiance is owed to each. It can be compared to Jesus' discussion of the same issue

in the New Testament. 39

As Becket's death draws ever closer, Eliot draws on the

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Biblical tradition of picturing true spiritual leaders as shepherds 40

the depiction of

God as a shepherd 41

and Jesus' self-identification as "the good shepherd" who "lays

down his life for the sheep".42

Becket states that distance shall never again separate

him from those for whose souls he has charge:"Never again. / Shall the sea run

between the shepherd and his fold‖.[MC 65]

Similarly, as he resists his fellow

priests' efforts to hurry him off to vespers, he declares, "They shall find the shepherd

here; the flock shall be spared".[MC 70] Obviously, such language strongly suggests

a parallel between Becket and Jesus; moreover, it emphasizes that what Becket does,

he does for his people. In terms of the existential crisis that Eliot's play presents,

Becket's transcendence of "living and partly living" will benefit the rest of humanity

by allowing "the wheel" to again turn, by delivering the world from its constant

"waiting". To the death of Becket, the Chorus delivers a lengthy, sensory reflection

filled with images of death and decay: e.g., "I have smelt / Death in the rose, death in

the hollyhock, sweet pea, hyacinth, primrose and cowslip."[MC 67] In response to

the Chorus' song of corruption, which culminates in the women's request that Becket

pray for them (again, an explicit anticipation of his canonization as a saint), the

archbishop echoes the first word we heard him speak: "Peace". It is as though Becket

knows that peace is at hand because his death is at hand-because, as he states, "This is

one moment"[MC 69] in which he is "not in danger: only near to death"[MC 70] As

does Jesus in the New Testament, Becket now knows that his "hour" is near .43

He is able to face his destiny because he has received "a tremour of bliss, a wink

of heaven, a whisper / And I would no longer be denied."[MC 70] Here we see how

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God's pattern-that "eternal design" of which the Third Priest spoke-is working itself

out in the present, "critical moment. in sordid particulars"[MC 57] Audiences might

also infer from Becket's comment that all we ever receive in this life are glimpses and

"rumours" of heaven, of transcendence; it is up to us to be loyal to them, to follow

and pursue them, in order that the "wheel" might turn-in order that, as Becket earlier

told the Chorus, "the figure of God's purpose may be made complete" Such

transcendence may not last in the world-as Becket told the Chorus, "You shall forget

these things, toiling in the household." but forgetting does not change the fact that

they happened, that the wheel turned, that transcendence was, for one "critical

moment," achieved. No one can live entirely under the crushing awareness of God's

purpose-as Becket states, in one of the drama's most-quoted lines, "Human kind

cannot bear very much reality"[MC 69] but the saints and martyrs, as they arise, must

inject transcendence into mundane "reality"-in the play's terms, "order" as the world

understands it-for life to be truly lived.

When the priests urge Becket to bar the doors of the cathedral, Becket again

reminds them, and the audience, of the difference between temporal and spiritual

power: "The Church shall protect her own, in her own way, not / As oak and stone;

stone and oak decay, / Give no stay, but the Church shall endure".[MC 73] Temporal

power and order are fleeting; spiritual power and order are not. The words are,

perhaps, another reminder of the inversion, what theologians sometimes call the

"great reversal," of values in the kingdom of heaven.44

Becket reminds the priests

that spiritual order and power are not utilitarian: "You argue by results, as this world

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does, / To settle if an act be good or bad".[MC 73] His words here echo his earlier

assertion that the worst possible temptation is to "do the right deed for the wrong

reason".[MC 44] Becket is doing more than repudiating the idea that ends justify

means; he is repudiating the very idea that ends can offer any firm moral guidance at

all, for in "every life and every act / Consequence of good and evil can be shown"

alike.[MC 73] More important than result is moral orientation: "I give my life / To the

Law of God above the Law of Man". [MC 74] For Becket, the spiritual trumps the

temporal. This allegiance to the spiritual also serves Eliot's purpose of portraying

Becket as a transcendent individual whose death achieves a transcendent purpose: "It

is not in time that my death shall be known; / It is out of time that my decision is

taken / If you call that decision / To which my whole being gives entire consent".[MC

74] Those latter lines are important because they prevent Becket from becoming the

very kind of utilitarian, pragmatic individual he is condemning-the kind of individual

that the Fourth Tempter in Part I enticed him to become. Becket does not, out of pride

or shrewd calculation, set out to die a martyr's death in order to achieve something.

Martyrdom is no crass means to an end, which may or may not be good or evil-after

all, as Becket states, "good and evil in the end become confounded".[MC 74] Rather,

Becket dies a martyr's death because it is the only possible consequence, the only

logical outcome, of his "whole being's consent" to witness to the spiritual in the midst

of the temporal.

Audiences may well think again of the Third Priest's earlier speech: "Even now,

in sordid particulars / The eternal design may appear"[MC 57] The particulars of

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Becket's death possess just that revelatory quality. Becket's warnings about the

confusion of temporal and spiritual means, however, are lost on the priests: "Force

him," they say [MC 74], to seek his own safety. Becket, however, stands steadfast in

his resolve to have the doors unbarred, and so the four knights, his executioners,

enter, drunk but prepared to do their bloody deed. As the Roman soldiers mocked

Jesus before his death, so now do the knights mock Becket. Eliot has Becket speak

the last words that history actually does attribute to him. The "blessed martyr Denys"

to whom Becket commends himself [MC 78] is Denis, bishop of Paris, killed by non-

Christian natives killed in the late third century, along with two of his companions.

"He is usually represented with his head in his hands because, according to the

legend, after his execution the corpse rose again and carried the head for some

distance"45

He is thus an appropriate symbol for the truth of Becket's words, "If you

kill me, I shall rise from my tomb".[MC 66] This resembles Jesus also because

Jesus too arose from his tomb on the Easter night.

The knights kill Becket, the Chorus realizes the transcendent effect his death is

having: "But this," the women cry, "this is out of life, this is out of time".[MC 77]

Becket's death has freed them from the "living and partly living" they have known for

the past seven years-that is, for the wholeness, the totality, of their previous

experience. Ironically and tragically, however, even as Becket is dying they are

rejecting the freedom his martyrdom makes available: "We did not wish anything to

happen. / We understood the private catastrophe, / The personal loss, the general

misery,/ Living and partly living"[MC 77]that key refrain is repeated yet once again,

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as if Eliot wishes no one to miss the point. Rather than being at peace, the Chorus can

only lament how the world has become stained. That Becket's death is a grievous

wrong. The Chorus is unable to see how its "sordid particulars" work out the will of

the spiritual. Eliot views Becket's death, perhaps, through the lens of widespread,

public horror that the early twentieth century brought in the semblance of World War

I and would bring even more horrifically, of course, with World War II . How could

the world ever dare hope to "return, to the soft quiet seasons‖[MC 77] after such

experiences? That the disasters and terrors of the new century were grievous wrongs

was not to be disputed; Eliot may, however, be pointing at a way in which these

wrongs can be received and seized as redemptive possibilities. Such moments are

"apocalyptic"-again, meaning quite revelatory in that they lay bare the conflict

between the temporal and the spiritual, and can become crises in which people such

as Becket pledge their loyalty to the spiritual in a transcendent act. The women of

Canterbury like many of us, do not react in that way. They see that "the world is

wholly foul"[MC 78] -which, as the evils of the twentieth century proved for so

many, it of course is-but they do not see how to move beyond that foulness-how, as

did Becket, to transcend it.

The apologia of the four knights for their act demonstrates the very moral failure

of the temporal order that Becket warned against: using the end-namely, the death of

this "meddlesome priest". When in fact he is a baron-one of those who rule unjustly

over the oppressed, according to the Chorus' speeches in Part I. He represents the end

of maintaining the status quo. Hugh de Morville represents the end of absolute

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temporal order: "Our King saw that the one thing needful"-note the allusion to Jesus'

language in Luke 10:42 was to restore order".[MC 81]

He explains to the audience that King Henry had made Becket the chancellor for

this very reason: to create "a union of spiritual and temporal administration, under the

central government".[MC 81] Becket invited his own demise. It is perhaps to signify

that lack of depth of religion in modern life that Eliot had switched from poetic form

to prose for the knights' speeches; when the knights leave the stage, however, so does

the prose, and Eliot reverts to poetry for the final moments of his drama. The Three

Priests recognize Becket's status as a saint long before the ecclesiastical hierarchy

ever will. While the First Priest interprets Becket's absence from them as reason for

despair-as evidence of "the heathen" now building on "the ruins" of the Church "their

world without God" the Third Priests insists that the Church shall persevere, for it "is

fortified / By persecution: supreme, so long as men will die for it"[MC 84] His

comment recalls the oft-quoted maxim of the third century theologian Tertullian,

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church." Verse becoming highly

Biblical here. The Priest also rejects a world without God- in terms of Eliot's play, a

purely temporal world, with only temporal "peace" and temporal "order"-as "the hell

of make-believe" in which the condemned "justify their]action to themselves".[MC

85] In its final speech, the Chorus offers praises to God, a new "Te Deum" to

complement the traditional one that Eliot's stage directions indicate should be playing

in the background: a hymn of praise that declares all things proclaim God in simply,

but truly, living. "They affirm Thee in living; all things affirm Thee in living"[MC

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86]-even if they would consciously deny God. But this life must be true living,

transcendent living in the manner of Becket, not the half-life of "living and partly

living" from which his death offers deliverance. It must be a complete embrace of

God's turning wheel, of the divine pattern of destiny; it must be marked, as Becket

was, with total devotion to manifesting the eternal and the spiritual in the transitory,

mundane and "sordid particulars" of the temporal: "The back bent under toil, the knee

bent under sin, the hands to the face under fear, the head bent under grief.".[MC

87]Eliot returns to the symbolic motif of the passage of the seasons, the same motif

with which the play began, to underscore the change that has taken place. The passing

seasons are no longer simply a time of waiting, a perpetual Advent: far from it, "Even

in us the voices of seasons, the snuffle of winter, the song of spring, the drone of

summer. Praise Thee"[MC 87] Giving the message of the holy Bible to praise thee

in all times.

The play does not, however, end on an entirely transcendent note. The Chorus

confesses, just before the curtain falls, that they are but "common men. who shut the

door and sit by the fire; / Who fear the blessing of God.".[MC 87] Eliot's drama

closes with a somber reminder that the temporal world resists the infusion of the

spiritual, and humanity often rejects the "Saints" sent to it who would blaze a trail of

transcendence. For transcendence, as the Chorus well knows, requires "loneliness.

surrender. deprivation" Thus they, and we, are all complicit in the deaths of martyrs

like Becket, for we "fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God".[MC 88]

The play concludes, appropriately, with the Kyrie Eleison-"Lord, have mercy upon

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us. / Christ, have mercy upon us. / Lord, have mercy upon us"-and with a plea for

Becket's intercession on our behalf to God. This is derived from the daily catholic

liturgy. So it cannot be denied that Eliot’s work was highly influenced by the

liturgy he must be enchanting in the church during the mass. The wheel was a

symbol, in medieval times, of the "wheel of life" or the "wheel of fortune," "which

never stands still, being constantly subject to the turns of fate". 46

No doubt Eliot

draws on these ancient associations in his text's multiple references to the wheel, but

he also subverts them by stating that, in fact, the wheel of fate-or, in Eliot's Anglo-

Catholic worldview, of God's providence and plan for history-has in fact been

standing still during Becket's seven-year absence from Canterbury. Becket's task is to

set the wheel turning again: to take his part, willingly and completely, in God's

"pattern" so that the wheel can resume turning and that "peace" can replace the mere

existence of "living and partly living."

The seasons also carry symbolic contents in Eliot's play. Chorus' invocations of

the passage of the seasons at the beginning of Part I and then at the end of Part II is

the best example.. At the beginning of the play, the passing seasons are in actuality

one long season of waiting, one endless Advent. But by the play's end, after Becket's

martyrdom, the seasons in their cycle have become part of human beings: "Even in us

the voices of seasons . praise Thee." Eliot's use of seasonal imagery will no doubt

remind readers of his work in The Waste Land. That epic poem's first line, "April is

the cruelest month," reinforces the poem's dominant mood of pessimism in the face of

what Eliot sees as the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the then still-young twentieth

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century. As in Murder in the Cathedral, the passage of the seasons in The Waste Land

is not a healthy cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Life has become stuck in "living and

partly living." Still, even The Waste Land was "not merely a poem of despair of the

present but of hope and promise for the future, since at the close the thunder speaks,

foretelling the coming of the life-giving rain".47

In a similar way, Murder in the

Cathedral ends in hope-although more tempered by a realization of humanity's

reluctance and inability to, in Becket's words, "bear too much reality‖.Thomas Becket

represents an ―archetypal figure‖ struggling with the ―temptations of his religious

conscience when it has set itself up against the state.‖ This struggle represents Eliot‘s

societal criticism on uprising fascism in Europe to the time when he wrote his

drama.‖Still, the "redemption" of the seasons is an important symbolic motif in the

play, as it was in Eliot's earlier work.

―Redeem yourself” had always been Eliot’s motive for his readers.

5.2

The Family Reunion and the Idea of Sin and Expiation

The Family Reunion is a play by T. S. Eliot. Written mostly in blank verse, it

incorporates elements from Greek drama and mid-twentieth-century detective plays

to portray the hero's journey from guilt to redemption.

Harry, the hero has a note of anxiety and despair when he comes to attend his

mother, Amy‘s birthday party. The frequent references to sin, guilt, atonement and

expiation and the search for salvation are the principle elements in the existential

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religious attitude towards life given in the play. Here we have echoes of Elektra. It

has expiation, gospels of puritans.

The reunion is expiation for the sin of the family and the ancestors.

Eliot shows that the sins of the fore fathers are on the heads of the children and needs

to get expiated. This theme is wholly derived from the Old Testament of the Holy

Bible. Most of the critics believe that the ‗sin and expiation‘ is the cause of the play,

the trio of Harry, Amy and Agatha did nothing beyond it. The entire drama revolves

around the three fold themes, which has allusions from Christianity as well as from

Indian philosophy which strictly believes on rotation of time.

1. The theme of sin and expiation.

2. The theme of time.

3. The theme of chaos, futility and spiritual disintegration

4. Surpassing the demon with faith in God and Righteousness.

Therefore, the four ideational constituents of the thematic structure of the play are:

(i) sin and expiation, (ii) the notion of time and (iii) the notion of futility (iv)

surpassing the demon. The major influences on the play are the influence of Greek

mythology, the influence of the trilogy known as Oresteia written by Aeschylus and

the influence of the First World War and the resulting circumstances.

The main dramatic action deals with the gradual and progressive liberation of

Harry Monchensey from his sense of guilt and defilement in a private, curse-haunted

universe. He is haunted by the belief that he pushed his wife off the ship. In fact

Harry has an alibi for the time, but whether he killed her or not he wished her dead

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and his feelings of guilt are the driving forces in the rest of the play.48

This liberation

is brought about by the presence of certain mysterious forces represented by the

Eumenides. They appear to Harry on three separate occasions; each time Harry

perceives them with increasing clarity, and as he does, he is led coincidentally to a

deepened discovery of himself and of the knowledge, he needs to recover his identity.

In other words, the appearances of the Eumenides coincide with the successive steps

in Harry's liberation, marking out as it were the stages of his progress. Harry sees the

Eumenides as concrete entities for the first time when he returns to Wishwood.

Whatever hope he had of finding release from his sense of guilt is reduced to despair

under the gaze of his pursuers. In their presence, Harry realizes that one does not

escape the burning wheel by flight or by violence; the former is merely a change of

position on the wheel, the latter a momentary reversal of its direction. This realization

puts Harry in a state of isolation which makes the entire universe seem corrupt and

corrupting. This deranging isolation breaks his contact with reality and projects him

into a private world without direction, purpose, or principle of conduct..

Haunted by hallucinations, Harry has no one to cheer him up. His family expects

him to take up routine as head of the household as though nothing had happened.

Annoyed by their pretense, Harry accuses his family of insensibility and tries to

awaken them to his suffering, without success. Thus, his first encounter with the

Eumenides finds Harry holding the hope that he can forget at Wishwood, and leaves

him with the despairing realization that he cannot. During the next stage of his

liberation, Harry gropes his way up from despair towards freedom and illumination.

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He starts by fastening upon a question he had asked himself earlier: why should the

Eumenides wait until his return to Wishwood to show. themselves? His aunt Agatha,

who does not believe his condition of mind can be explained by his professed crime,

encourages him to explore the past as the path to freedom like other Eliot's heroes

who are prophets of the past. From this point on, Harry becomes the hunter as well as

hunted -like Oedipus, hunting himself down, pursuer and pursued. Where his cousin

Mary removes the illusion that he had once been happy at Wishwood, she confirms

his stirring suspicion that his present misery is somehow linked to the house. The

possibility of a romantic relationship glimmers for a moment in his mind as a means

of escape from his guilt and loneliness. At this moment, the Eumenides appear to him

again, this time to warn him away from his contemplated evasion. But with the faith

of God he had overcome the haunt. Eliot again promotes the faith in religion and god

as usual. As in Christianity the idea of God becoming incarnate to save himself is

absurd. God is not affected at all by anything demons could do. The only purpose of

God's incarnation in Jesus Christ is the salvation of humans from the effect of sin.

The problem in Christianity is not that demons are a threat to God, but that humans

have chosen to disobey God as they find doing evil is easier and the way towards god

is tough and full of hurdles. But through penance humans have a chance to return to

personal communion with their creator as the god is ever-ready to forgive the sinners

who repent.

When discussing the concept of sin and expiation it has been pointed out that

although sin is considered an old-fashioned and out-moded concept, particularly by

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the younger generation today, Eliot has in this play presented this concept with a

freshness of modernity. Harry, the central character of this play, is suffering from a

sense of profound guilt for having pushed his wife down into the Atlantic. From the

story of the play, it is not very clear whether he really killed her or whether he only

imagines to have killed her. The sense of guilt makes him spiritually restless just as

Macbeth‘s sense of guilt made him undergo an almost unbearable spiritual agony.

Just as Macbeth murdered King Duncan, Harry killed or imagines to have killed his

wife and just as Macbeth's sense of guilt appears to him in the form of Banquo‘s

ghost, Harry feels tormented by the appearance of the furies. When Agatha tells him

that his father also wanted to kill his wife, his mother, Amy, he feels that others in his

generation have also done what he has accused himself to have done. Strangely, this

gives him a sense of expiation, a sense of psychic relief. The furies are known to be

terrible entities known for tormenting their victims. Towards the end of the play when

he feels expiated, the angry furies, he feels, have metamorphosed themselves into the

kindly spirits known as Eumenides of the ancient Greek mythology.

The concept of time is another ideational constituent of the thematic structure of

this play. A special feature of this play is that almost all the characters in it talk about

time. Harry, the central character of the play, and the chorus has made a number of

epigrammatically and intellectually stimulating statements about time. In some of

Shakespeare‘s tragedies. Shakespeare‘s heroes also make memorable statements

about time. A remarkable feature of The Family Reunion is that almost all the

characters in this play have to say something about time. The view taken in this thesis

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is that the great importance given to time in this play as in his famous poems, The

Waste Land and The Four Quartets was in all probability triggered by what Einstein

and others had to say about time. In Newtonian physics time was thought to be like a

river flowing from the past to the present and then onwards toward the future.

Einstein's theory of relativity revolutionized the traditional concept of time and

emphasized that time was a relative and not an absolute concept. Einstein generated a

great deal of re-thinking about time. The view taken here in this thesis is that although

the views that different characters in this play express about time are not exactly what

Einstein has to say about time, the speculations about time in The Family Reunion are

likely to have been caused by Einstein‘s concept of relativity, particularly by its

relevance to the concept of time. The third ideational constituent is the idea of futility,

meaninglessness and nothingness expressed so frequently and forcefully in this play

as in Eliot's Waste Land and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The Second World

War created a kind of chaotic social and economic order. Thousands of people were

killed in the war. Thousands of wives lost their husbands and thousands of mothers

lost their sons. The economy of the countries involved in the war was completely

ruined. There was frustration, dissatisfaction and restlessness everywhere. This idea

of futility, restlessness and meaninglessness in life has in this play been very skillfully

harmonized with the idea of sin and with the idea of time. The view taken in this

thesis is that Harry's story is a distant echo of the story of Orestes in the trilogy called

Oresteia written by Aeschylus. Just as Orestes killed Clytemnestra, his mother, and

was pursued, therefore, by the angry furies, Harry thinks he killed his wife and is

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pursued by the furies. Just as the crime committed by Orestes was ultimately forgiven

and expiation took place, Harry also feels expiated towards the end of the play. The

three furies that Harry sees in this play show the influence of Greek mythology in this

play. The furies are part of the Greek mythology and are believed to have poisoned

snakes in their hair and hot red eyes dropping blood all around. Eliot introduced

chorale to philosophize the atmosphere of the play.

When Mary pretends? that there is nothing to see, Harry withdraws his confidence.

Now he is convinced that Wishwood holds part of the secret he seeks, and he decides

to stay. This decision to face the Furies and not to run from them is the second stage

of his liberation, part of the progressive ascent towards the experience of truth Eliot

feels. The third and final stage begins during his conversation with Warburton and

ends during his final duet with Agatha. Warburton provides fragments of the puzzle,

and Agatha fills in the missing links. She recalls her affair with his father and his

plans to murder the wife he hated. Harry asks, "In what way did he wish to murder

her'?" This is apparently the overwhelming question. Up to this point, whether or not

Harry actually pushed his wife overboard is left vague; in light of Harry's condition,

Uncle Charles has viewed the confession with skepticism, perhaps even suspecting

that Harry cannot disassociate the pollution of his wife's existence from that of her

death. Now when Agatha forces Harry to focus upon the event, to strip himself of his

compulsive habit of self-immolation, he begins to understand that he has imagined

the murder: somehow, he has objectified a fantasy, and then accepted the

objectification as true. Here is the situation we can piece together from Eliot's

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unpublished letters to Martin Browne and from hints scattered throughout the play:

Harry is standing on the deck of the liner, a few feet from his wife, who is leaning

against the rail. She has sometimes talked of suicide, and now, is drunkenly taunting

him with this threat. She overdoes it and accidentally falls overboard. Because the

whole scene of shoving her overboard has passed through his mind before, Harry

believes he has pushed her. He does not call for help, or attempt to rescue her in any

way. His recollection of this extraordinary behavior-the event itself he has buried

deeply in his unconsciousness-convinces him that he is guilty. The wish has become

the overwhelming reality.

Agatha helps him to understand this through her patience and love, and the load of

guilt drops from Harry. He perceives that his remark to Warburton, "The things that

are going to happen/Have already happened" is "true in another sense." His father's

desire to kill his wife has repeated itself in him as a kind of mysterious family curse.

The inheritance for which he has returned turns out to be the knowledge of the past,

and the knowledge that the past may be redeemable. The truth frees him from his

guilt.

Harry's perspective is re-ordered by his release, and he is attracted to the agent of

his release, half as a son, half as a lover. Agatha, who has also known "that circular

desert", responds with the opposite but complementary love and they join in spiritual

meeting, the only true reunion in the play. As Agatha responds, Harry is carried away

by his mounting excitement, expressed in images of encounter. But the encounter is

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brief. Agatha's answer is enigmatic certainly, but seems to say this: one does not pass

twice through the same door (to the desert) or return to the door through which one

never passed (fulfillment in love). A bond such as theirs, instead of being a refuge

from responsibility, must be a release for a new beginning, a key to other doors that

remain to be opened, for new experiences beyond life itself.

Harry does not comprehend her meaning until the Eumenides appear for the third

time. Now Harry does not deny them. His rose-garden experience raises him to a state

of spirit, which is described more explicitly in Part II of Burnt Norton. Surrounded by

a sense of grace, Harry senses the higher function of the Eumenides by connecting

their appearance with what Agatha has been trying to tell him: "relief from what

happened" comes not through evasion, but through quest; not through rejection, but

through the "awful daring of a moment's surrender."

Illumined by this insight, Harry is released for action and suffering on a higher

plane; he accepts without fully understanding Agatha's paradox, "To rest in our own

suffering/Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more." When Harry

announces his decision to depart from Wishwood on the trail of the Eumenides, his

mother concludes that Agatha has persuaded him to become a missionary and asks

him to change his mind. Harry refuses the request, and departs with Downing in

pursuit of the "hint half guessed, the gift half understood" Dry Salvages, V . Soon

after his departure, his mother collapses, and the play ends as Agatha and Mary, in

circular procession around the cake intended for her, gradually extinguish the candles

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in a tenement service for both of the departed. They reverse their circular movement

to indicate that the wheel has also changed direction. As Harry is freed to follow the

promptings of his spirit, we see how intricately the sin-salvation symbol has been

woven into the horizontal structure of the play.

To his valet, Harry is a hero. Having been most low, he becomes most high by

accepting the election of the Eumenides to explore the meaning of the rose-garden

experience. When first confronted by these powers, he sees them as evil eyes, but

during the moment of illumination, he perceives them as the "final eye," judicial and

benevolent, the shift from the plural to the singular is significant and parallels the

play's ascent from pagan to Christian meaning. Having tracked himself down, Harry

leaves his homeland with his will made ready for the thousand natural shocks that an

heir is heir to.

Let us consider the play in this light. Eliot's interest in present time is reflected in

the play's examination of the nature of psychological guilt, its effect upon people in

general and an individual in particular living in the modern world. The concrete

embodiments of the guilt-sense, the Eumenides, reveal themselves for the first time at

Wishwood because it is the locus of the guilt. "The origin of wretchedness" lies in the

unhappy bondage of Harry's parents. Harry is pursued by the Eumenides – the

avenging Furies who pursue Orestes in the Oresteia; they are seen not only by Harry

but also by his servant and the most perceptive member of his family, Agatha.49

Guilt

about his homicidal wish drives Harry's father into exile, while her feelings of guilt

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separate Agatha from the family. Harry is left to the care of a mother who clutches

and dominates him. Out of his position as the possessed, he develops a strange

morality being well is pleasing mother, being bad is hurting her.

He feels guilt for resisting her and out of his guilt, feels a desire to be punished;

therefore, he misbehaves in order to be chastised and therefore purged of his guilt.

The chastisement in turn intensifies his hostility, which culminates in an act of open

defiance: he marries a "non-U" instead of the woman whom his mother intends for

him. The mother feels strong homicidal impulses towards the intruder To punish

herself for these impulses, the mother devotes her life to the "purposes of Wishwood"

and eventually becomes, like the manor-house, a shell of stone. These tragedies

influence Harry. Never having known love, he expresses the opposite impulse

towards his wife, who has become a surrogate for his hostility towards all women. He

quite readily holds himself guilty in the accident, for he has come to regard himself as

an outcast predestined to crime. Later, he reaches a high pitch of tenderness with

Agatha, but at this time his super-ego in the form of the Eumenides, remind him that

this is not the way to divine union. However, this exploration of the past cures Harry

of his near schizophrenia. 50

Eliot is slave to neither his source nor his psychology. He

develops the dimension of the play by infusing it with the truth of his religion.

Without recourse to specific Christian terminology, he brings to fruition his aim of

supplementing the cathedral play with the kind of drama, which deals with situations

of modern life in an implicitly Christian way. Hence, the action acquires a third

dimension, which may satisfy what the author has called "the essentially religious

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craving ... latent in all serious lovers of the drama." Harry learns that his sense of guilt

and isolation are part of a condition that goes deeper than either- the condition of sin.

The author has expressed himself directly on this subject: "People often talk as if the

sense of sin were something invented by a group of gloomy fanatics ... it is absolutely

essential to Christianity." Sin, to Eliot, is the universal sickness responsible for man's

nature. He makes Warburton say: "We're all of us ill in one way or another". Of

course, sin may grow out of thought as well as deed-as Christ's own words testify.

Hence, what began as a primitive flight from fear is changed into a Christian

pilgrimage of penance, with pagan furies at the entrance and bright angels at the exit.

As a dramatically perceptible parallel to the interior transvaluation, there is the

exaltation of Agatha's pagan exorcisms into Christian rituals of hope. While the stage

at the end is symbolically darkened, Harry descends into the Night of the Soul. For

the faithful, the Aeschylean concept is elevated to one of nobler meaning: as Agatha

says, perhaps for the author, "What we have written is not a story of detection,/Of

crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation."

These ritualistic utterances of Agatha are fitted into the design of the play to

coincide, like the appearances of the Eumenides (which touch them off), with the

stages of Harry's liberation. Harry, with Agatha's encouragement, announces his

intention to go away from Wishwood, leaving his steady younger brother John to take

over. Amy, despairing at Harry's renunciation of Wishwood, dies (offstage), "An old

woman alone in a damned house", and Harry and his faithful servant, Downing,

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leave.[ SS 198-200] The first is said just after Harry arrives; the second, spoken

shortly after the second appearance of the Eumenides, is an exorcism of evil. This

pattern of development is recapitulated in the concluding ritual between Mary and

Agatha, wherein the primitive birthday observance and curse-cure, with its "follow,

follow" procession, becomes a Christian communion and prayer. Thus, the main

religious theme of Transvaluation of curse into blessing is worked out like in the

pattern of the runic passages. Despite these Greek themes, Stephen Spender

commented that the whole play was "about the hero's discovery of his religious

vocation as a result of his sense of guilt."[SS 198]

It is worth comparing The Family Reunion with Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata.

Both plays depict the miseries and crimes within the family house, both preach that

life in the world is inextricably involved in sin, guilt and unhappiness, both preach

renunciation and the sense of contact with another dimension of reality, Christian-

Buddhist in Strindberg, Christian in Eliot‖. 51

5.3

The Cocktail Party and the Christian, Hindu and Buddhist

Philosophy

This play came in 1950 .It again deals with the theme of martyrdom of Celia

because of sin and expiation for her illegitimate relation with Edward and her effort

and persuasion on Edward to leave his wife Lavinia for the sake of their relationship.

Eliot once again tried to portray the society that lacked in virtue. He as a preacher

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again gives the massage that one has to pass through purgation for the forgiveness of

the sins. Through the conversation in the end of the drama, Sir Harcourt Reilly acts as

an spiritual advisor to all and comforts all the characters who were shocked on Celia‘s

death. He ultimately conveyed the message that it is the fate that every one who sins

will meet in the end. That is the only way to salvation. The play is again more or less

a moral teaching. The concept of sin and the need for redemption was always present

in Eliot‘s mind. His ardent faith in Christianity is seen everywhere in his poetry,

drama as well as the prose. The last solution for attaining salvation is martyrdom as

did Becket Celia and Harry. He always wanted to raise the spirits of the sinners by

haunting spirits who make them realize that they have done wrong. Eliot‘s heroes

symbolize Christ. There is something Christ like in Becket Harry and Celia. Again, in

The Cocktail Party, we notice the echo of Patanjali in the following lines: ‗I see that

my life was determined long ago; And that the struggle to escape from it Is only

make-believe, a pretence That what is, is not, or could be changed.‘ But ‗The Waste

Land‘ is a criticism of life from the Christian, Hindu and Buddhist point of view‘ says

F.L. Mayo.In Buddhist Philosophy,we are told three stages to achieve: Nirvana-

Attachment–Detachment—Indifference.

American born English poet Eliot has made great achievements in owning the

literature that holds impact on both the eastern and the western readers of English

Literature. The reason can be that he himself was a strong Christian with a huge

knowledge of Hindu Philosophy. It was this inclination of his towards eastern

philosophy that made him study philosophy at Harvard from 1906 to 1909, earning

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his bachelor's degree after three years, instead of the usual four. 52

Frank Kermode

writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908,

when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature 1899.

This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without

Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les

amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life.53

The Harvard Advocate

published some of his poems, and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the

American novelist. After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909–

1910, Eliot moved to Paris, where from 1910–1911, he studied philosophy at the

Sorbonne. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Alain-

Fournier.[F K 2000] from 1911–1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian

philosophy and Sanskrit.54

Stephen Spender, in the standard literary biography of T.S. Eliot, says that after

visiting Paris in 1911, Eliot joined Charles Lanman‘s Philology Course, at Harvard.

Lanman was a distinguished Sanskrit Scholar and Orientalist. Eliot was with him for

two whole years and then went on to study the metaphysics of Patanjali for another

two years. Eliot summed up this whole experience rather cleverly by saying it left

him in a state of ‗enlightened mystification‘, he gained a thorough intellectual grasp

of Advaita Vedanta and all it entailed. He was also very much moved by early

Buddhist Scriptures, which he said ‗affected him as much as many of the parts of the

Old Testament‘. He was later to describe the Bhagavad Gita as ‗the next greatest

philosophical poem to the Divine Comedy within his experiences‘. However, Eliot

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never left his vital essential Christian faith while applying and enjoying these Eastern

influences.

The Allusions in the Play

T. S. Eliot was at Princeton in 1948, while he was working on the play One-Eye

Riley, which would eventually develop into The Cocktail Party, when he received the

letter of winning that year's Nobel Prize for literature. His literary reputation was built

mainly on his proficiency as a poet and a critical theorist, but in the later years of his

life most of Eliot's work was concentrated on writing drama that would display his

Christian sensibilities combined with Eastern philosophy like that of a much mature

and secular literary icon who evolved out of a strong Anglican man.

Play The Cocktail Party is analyzed in the light of the Christian, the Hindu and

Buddhist Philosophy, which he studied and whose influence is seen in most of his

poems and plays in his latter years’ works.

This play has the following allusions:

1. The Christian martyrdom of the mistress character Celia is seen as a sacrifice that

permits the predominantly secular life of the community to continue. In his 1949

Spencer Lecture, T. S. Eliot admitted to trying to conceal the source of the main

theme of The Cocktail Party (TCP).1 He confessed that he took his theme of a wife

who chooses to die for her husband from the Alcestis of Euripides. ‗I was still

inclined to go a Greek dramatist for my theme, but I was determined to do so merely

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as a point of departure, and to conceal the origins so well that nobody would identify

them until I pointed them out myself. In this at least I have been successful; for no

one of my acquaintance recognized the source of my story in the Alcestis of

Euripides.55

2. The impermanence and sufferings in the lives of all the leading characters and

Celia working for her own Nirvana reflect the Buddhist philosophy that says “life is

suffering”. According to other interpretations by Buddhist teachers and scholars,

lately recognized by some Western non-Buddhist scholars, the "truths" do not

represent mere statements, but are categories or aspects that most worldly phenomena

fall into, grouped in two: Suffering and causes of suffering and Cessation and the

paths towards liberation from suffering.56

3. The attaining of still point ―the bindu‖ where nothing can be altered and everything

seems to be out of human reach. Henry Harcourt Reilly explains this to the

chamberlaynes when they were worried on getting the news of Celia‘s killing, thus

reflecting the Hindu philosophy. It also contains the message of Shree Gita that u will

get the fruit of your actions. Patanjali is seen in the following lines: ‗I see that my life

was determined long ago; And that the struggle to escape from it is only make-

believe, a pretence that what is, is not, or could be changed.

A married couple, Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne, who suffer impermanence

and separation after five years of marriage due to their infidelity, organizes The

Cocktail Party. The first and last acts of the play feature cocktail parties held at their

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home where their marital problems are aggravated by the pressure of having to keep

up social appearances, portraying the modern society where the structure lacks in

sincerity and lives in mere showbiz. Partially satire on the traditional British drawing-

room comedy and partially philosophical discourse on the nature of human relations.

Any how the play explores the modern human conditions of love, marriage, post

marital affair ,desire, infidelity and choosing of the right path after the intervention of

a spiritual advisor who can be a psychiatrist too in this modern urban society and

leading realization, guilt, sacrifice and penance in search of salvation.

Eliot himself had pointed out that this play owes to Alcestis, by the Greek

playwright Euripides (480-406 B c). In the Greek tragedy, the title character sacrifices

her life for her husband, King Admetus of Thessaly, but is rescued from Hades by

Hercules. In Eliot's version, Lavinia is brought back by a mysterious Unidentified

Guest Sir Henry Harcourt Reilly, a psychiatrist at the party, who turns out, in true

twentieth-century form. Edward and Lavinia both consult him. They learn that their

life together, though hollow and superficial, is preferable to life apart; a lesson that is

rejected by the play's third main character, Edward's mistress, who, with the

psychiatrist's urging, sets out to experience a life of honesty and uncertainty.

Edwards‘s mistress Celia is filled with guilt and chooses to go for penance and

reconciliation with God through her services to the missionary. Thus reflecting the

Christian elements of penance, sacrifice and martyrdom. The first act of The Cocktail

Party is the only one divided into three separate scenes. The first scene opens on a

party in the drawing room of the Chamberlayne home in London with all of the play‘s

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major characters—Edward, Julia, Celia, Peter, Alex, and the Unidentified Guest—

present. There is witty bantering about people not present, making this seem like

many British drawing-room comedies. Lavinia Chamberlayne is missing, and her

husband, Edward, a lawyer, makes up a feeble excuse for the absence of his wife,

who has invited the guests. He tells them that she has gone to visit an aunt in the

country, but most of the party guests are skeptical. They had never heard of any such

aunt of hers. They all leave except for the Unidentified Guest, whom Edward asks to

stay and talk with him. As always Eliot introduces a spiritual guide who shows the

way towards virtues and tells how to depart from the guilt as Amy does in The Family

Reunion and Eggerson does in The Confidential Clerk.

Edward confesses the stranger that Lavinia left him the day before, and that he

tried to cancel the party but could not reach the people who did attend. During the

conversation, he expresses his concern over what his life will be like without her, and

the stranger tells him that he will arrange for Lavinia to return the following day

reflecting the Greek element. Although Edward speaks alone with Celia Coplestone,

his mistress, and we learn that they planned to be together pending the breakup of his

marriage. Yet Edward now seems uncertain about Celia, as if he has a mind to return

to his wife after he talks to the unidentified guest. The next day the Unidentified

Guest indeed brings Lavinia home, and she and Edward discuss their marital

problems, and especially Edward‘s indecisiveness. Edward becomes convinced that

his indecision is a mental illness, and he seeks treatment, one day ending up in the

office of the Unidentified Guest, finally identified as Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, a

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psychologist. Lavinia joins their session, and reveals her own affair with Peter

Quilpe, another frequent cocktail party guest. Through indirect means, including

vague talk about a sanitarium, Reilly convinces the Chamberlaynes to resume their

marriage. Then Celia comes in to see Reilly, and she later decides to do missionary

work. In the final act, set two years later, the Chamberlaynes are depicted as having a

more tranquil marriage, and we learn that Celia was killed violently in Kinkanja,

where she was doing her missionary work. In spite of some characters‘ shock on

hearing the news, most accept her death as natural, perhaps even noble.

As the busybody Julia Shuttlethwait sums up for us: ―Everyone makes a

choice, of one kind or another./ And then must take the consequences. Celia chose / A

way of which the consequence was crucifixion”.57

Clearly, this is the main idea of the

play. Despite Eliot‘s own well-known Christianity, The Cocktail Party does not argue

specifically for Christian solutions to the human condition. Celia, endowed by her

creator (Eliot) with such character traits, as having been a poet and a nurse, is

something of a martyr for Christian ideals, as is made clear by her death at least twice

being characterized as a crucifixion. However, this is seen as but one of several paths;

holding cocktail parties may be an equally valid path. No, The Cocktail Party is

simply an idea play, dramatizing the condition of Man as a moral agent, a chooser.

As an idea play, The Cocktail Party has a few things going for it. It is a ―well-

made‖ play in the sense that the conflicts spawned from Edward‘s infidelity are

introduced at the beginning and resolved by the play‘s end. There is a plot that

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develops. In addition, the characters all speak a dry verse, the meter of which helps

suggest the lifeless custom of their lives. Eliot has a gift for this sort of dialogue;

many of the characters sound like the defeated narrator of Eliot‘s early Love Song of

J. Alfred Prufrock. The dialogue sparkles with intelligence, and is what keeps the play

going. But its occasional wittiness almost seems out of place embedded within the

more somber themes. Nevertheless, the play suffers from numerous problems. It is

difficult to picture Celia participated in an affair with Edward thus committing

adultery. Edward too was guilty of cheating his wife. Then he finds himself alone

with the astute and slippery Unidentified Guest, who is a master of reverse

psychology, and has the mysterious power to bring his wife back. Had the

Unidentified Guest had not intervened, Edward might simply have chosen to marry

Celia. Nevertheless, as usual Eliot wanted to uplift spirituality amongst his crisis-

ridden characters so he introduced a spiritual advisor in the form of a psychiatrist

reflecting the mood and temperament of the modern waste landers. The Unidentified

Guest‘s eerie pronouncements about Edward‘s indecision stacks the deck against

Edward choosing for himself. Then Edward is roundly criticized for his lack of

choice. He realizes his moral duty. Eliot fulfills his purpose to preach the society

lacking in religion and conduct. Julia, Alex, and Reilly form a bizarre conspiracy,

whose entire existence seems devoted to making people see that they must live with

their choices. Surely, few of us have encountered such benevolence as theirs. Julia

sends nearly all the characters mysterious telegrams to meet at the Chamberlayne‘s,

where she has planted a de facto spy in Reilly. Reilly as psychologist freely discusses

214

his patients‘ problems with Julia and Alex, his co-conspirators. Because these three

show human motives, these characters exist as device in the machinery of the play, to

show the other characters their ultimate fates.

Eliot tries to show the illegitimate relationships as the hell in the modern society.

He writes: ―And other people bring no comfort or companionship. Edward echoes

Sartre‘s formula when he says: ―What is hell? Hell is oneself, / Hell is alone, the other

figures in it / Merely projections‖.[CP 98]One senses that Eliot has a whole

philosophy of choice and selfhood lurking under here somewhere, one that he may

have been better off writing as a philosophical treatise but he employed these

philosophies to show the fate of wrong doings on earth. Eliot was always firm to

philosophize his literature. Eliot owns nearly unreadable masterpieces such as the

long poem The Wasteland -a poem that uses six languages along the way, the Biblical

allusions and the Hindu philosophy and The Hollow Men, which paint a dark vision

of man as "broken" because of his lack of faith in God. There are religious overtones

in The Cocktail Party too that tells that religion is the right path.

That psychologists such as Reilly have taken the role of father confessors from

priests is a well-known twentieth century development. Eliot had spent a good time

with priests and Bishops during his conflicts with his wife Vivienne so he reflects

those priestly sermons in his preaching .Celia, the play‘s martyr, describes her plight

to Reilly as having a ―sense of sin,‖ and believing that something is wrong with the

world itself, and that she must ―atone‖ for it. [CP 137] Here Eliot reflects the

215

Christian atonement. During Celia‘s confession to Reilly, they converse about the

meaninglessness of the human condition, and it is here that Eliot is at his eloquent

best. Celia: ―Everyone‘s alone…They make noises, and think they are talking to each

other‖[CP 134] Reilly: ―Both ways avoid the final desolation / of solitude in the

phantasmal world / of imagination, shuffling memories and desires‖[CP 142] an echo

of the first lines of The Wasteland, ―April is the cruelest month …mixing /Memory

and desire.‖ Here he reflects the Buddhist philosophy that desire is the cause of

sufferings. Perhaps Eliot‘s distilled eloquence about Mankind‘s quandary is best

offered in poetry, where the reader is expected to pat every word in search of

meaning. As a drama, the characters in The Cocktail Party feel like props for Eliot‘s

idea. Celia the martyr. Edward is Eliot‘s stand-in, existentialist man. Reilly the

Freudian father confessor. Julia the busybody, who seems to have no life of her own

other than to help the Chamberlayne‘s (and perhaps countless others) seek out their

―salvation‖ through Reilly. And Alex the world-traveler with mysterious global

connections, always speaking with a knowing air. Peter exists to square off the

Edward/Lavinia/Celia love triangle.

The characters all speak with intelligence; they just sound too much like Eliot 58

Thomas Stearns Eliot has deep interest in Indian philosophical systems following his

studies in Sanskrit, and the principal Upanishads at Harvard University, and his

poetry and plays often showed the influence of Hindu thought and

sensibility.‗Impermanence and Suffering‘; ‗The Wheel‘; ‗Craving and Maya‘; and‘

The Still Point‘ are the elements that formulate the major part of the allusions Eliot

216

took from the Hindu and the Buddhist philosophies. In Act II of his verse play The

Cocktail Party, there is an exact reference to the Mahaparinibbana-sutta of the

Digha-nikaya. 59

Go in peace, my daughter.

Work out your salvation with diligence...

And when I say to one like her

Work out your salvation with diligence,

I do not understand

What I myself am saying...

And now O priests, I take my leave of you

All the constituents of being are transitory:

Work out your salvation with diligence. [CP]

In general, we may say from these that the Hindu and Buddhist thought noticeably

influenced Eliot without sacrificing his personal High Anglican faith. Eliot‘s

references to recurrence, reincarnation and destiny, or karma typifies the attitude that

conforms with both Hindu and Buddhist ideas. In The Cocktail Party, we find the

lines: The man I saw before, he was only a projection- I see that now- of something I

wanted- No, not wanted-something I aspired to- Something I desperately wanted to

exist.[CP] It is with the metaphor of the still point or bindu that fascinated Eliot

perhaps the most. Bradley‘s magnum opus Appearance and Reality, which also draws

heavily on Eastern thought, was a major influence on the young Eliot. He has fused

217

Indian philosophical themes and symbols with the western worldview. He examines

in various aspect the symbolisms of the wheel of time, maya that is desire, and the

bindu or ‗still point‘, along with the problems raised by world suffering,

impermanence, and facade and reality; he used quotations from the Upanishads and

the Bhagavad Gita in his major works with his Anglican sermons and dogmas. His

universally enlightened mind took shape in the form of his universally appealing

literature.

Eliot's plays are not 'tragic' in the Greek sense: they contain too much assurance

that for all their horror things ultimately, are controlled by benevolent forces. Ibsen's

spiritual adventurers have no such assurance, neither do Sophoclean heroes or

heroines have such assurances. .The poetic heart of The Cocktail Party is in Act 2 in

Celia's attempt to communicate her spiritual condition to Harcourt Reilley after we

have seen the dismissal of Edward and Lavinia as somewhat commonplace sufferers

of limited vision. They must return to be the 'chamberlains' of the ordinary world,

after glimpsing the depths. The Celia-Harcour-Reilley colloquy, for Eliot, is the ideal

form of communication, a mutual searching for the precise and most adequate

expression of an almost mystic reality. It is a 'high communion' between the

Characters, the Poet and the attentive audience - a shared exploration of

consciousness. However, again, there is that 'optimistic' assurance that, whatever

Celia‘s sense of inauthenticity, of 'sin' or anomie, there is a place for it in the larger

scheme of things. Even Celia‘s horrible death can be seen as meaningful: all the other

characters now discover they have been in contact with a Saint, and they are suitably

218

chastened, illuminated and humbled. Just as the Christian community finds a meaning

in the succession of years, as each year celebrates its martyrs and saints. Hence, once

again we find a martyr spiritual advisor sin guilt and unhappiness and the search for

peace and salvation in the drama making it religious and heavenly.

…action

None the less fruitful if neither you nor we

Know, until the judgment after death,

What is the fruit of action. [CP]

Celia Coplestone, guilt-ridden by her adulterous affair, goes to Sir Harcourt Reilly,

the spiritual advisor who tells her to:

Go in peace, my daughter.

Work out your salvation with diligence.[CP]

The words of the Buddha to his disciple Ananda were: ―So karohi dipam attano

(Be

A lamp to yourself. Work out your nirvana.‖ The difference between ―salvation‖

and ―nirvana‖ is critical. Salvation suggests self-fulfillment after self-discovery;

nirvana implies snuffing-out, self-extinction. Besides this we can see the Hindu belief

that demons are beings that currently reap the fruits of their bad karma acquired in

previous lives. However, the bad things they do are not arbitrary, as the law of karma

makes sure that the humans afflicted by demons are justly punished for their own bad

deeds performed in previous lives. Therefore, from a global point of view the demons'

bad deeds must be seen as necessary in balancing karma. Existence as a demon is

219

limited, and eventually there is reincarnation back into human form and henceforth a

new chance given to attain liberation. Same is the case with Celia who worked as a

missionary and got killed while spreading the word of lord and the spiritual advisor

Sir Harcourt Reilly consoles the Edwards and Peter not to be sad for her as she was

destined for it. Therefore, does Celia, the heroine of Eliot‘s play exhibiting eastern

philosophy along with Christian faith.

5.4

The Confidential Clerk and the Spiritual Crisis

We have analyzed the above three plays in detail and now we will go for just

thematic analyses of the coming two plays to locate the Biblical and Philosophical

analysis Sir Claude Mulhammer, a wealthy entrepreneur, decides to bring back his

illegitimate son Colby into the household by employing him as his confidential clerk.

He has hope that his eccentric wife, Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer, will develop a

liking to the boy and will allow him to live as her adopted son. She in fact, becomes

convinced that Colby is actually her own son, who was lost years ago. Meanwhile

Lucasta Angel wants to marry B. Kaghan, but neither seems to have any parents at

all. A drama of mistaken identity and confusion ensues.

The 'confidential clerk' of the title refers both to Colby, in his new job, and

Eggerson, Sir Claude's old clerk who is seen retiring at the start of the play but returns

in the final act in order to resolve the situation showing the perfect climax. As in his

other plays, Eliot's interests in classical drama are obvious from the formal structures,

220

the subject-matter, and the judgement-scene ending. On the other hand, the influence

of drawing room comedy is also paramount and the play is blessed not only with an

entertaining if convoluted plot, but a regular peppering of witty one-liners. But in the

whole scenario the message that Eliot wanted to convey was his own Anglican faith.

In the struggle for survival, every character is searching for self-satisfaction in the

physical world that is the wealth and the relations. Where as the motive of Eliot was

once again to deliver a sermon to the crisis ridden modern world to turn towards god

renouncing the worldly pleasures. Therefore, he rotates the story around Colby,

finally shows him as the Hero who decides not to live with Sir Claude‘s wealth, and

chooses to become a priest and play guitar in the church. He is happy to know that he

is Mrs. Guzzard‘s son and is free to pursue his choice of serving lord and the church.

The message that Eliot wanted to convey to the then audience was done. His plays

suffer from his own personal guilt and Anglican faith. After his separation with

Vivienne, he had spent a good span of time with the bishop and the priests.60

He

developed that instinct of spreading the word of the lord, and he could not stay away

from it and he was a great scholar of Hindu philosophy so he took allusions from that

too.

He was disturbed with the illegitimate relationships pf men and women in the

modern world so his characters exhibit such a society and he tries to preach the

humanity with the tragic end of his characters to uplift their spirituality. For that

reason, only he always has a character in all of his plays who act as the spiritual

advisor and suggests for purgation.

221

5.5

The Rock and the Sigh of the Degrading Church

The Rock, was specifically designed to be produced in a church, basically dealt

with the collapse of cultural Christianity so evident in our day--a Church in disarray

which "does not seem to be wanted any where except for the wedding purposes--a

Church desperately needs to hear the voice of Christ, the "Rock". Lamentably, Eliot

sighs in some lines. Such as" the wind shall say: ‗here were decent godless people:

their only monument the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls.‘

In order to understand T.S. Eliot‘s poem, Choruses from ―The Rock,‖ one must

first understand Eliot‘s views on contemporary theology and spirituality. He felt as if

people were moving away from the Church and were losing their religion in goodwill

of more secular worship. The following passage from Eliot‘s choruses can summarize

his entire argument that he makes in Choruses from ―The Rock‖. But it seems that

something has happened that has never happened earlier than: though we know not

just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say,

but for no God; and this has never happened before that men both deny gods and

worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they

call Life, or Race, or Dialectic. The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells

upturned, and what have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned

upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards. In T.S. Eliot‘s Choruses

from 'The Rock' Eliot complains that something has happened that has never

happened before: for the first time, man stands separated from God. He believes that

222

man stands lonely, in great darkness and gloom, with no light to guide him; and Eliot

is right. Something has happened that has never happened before. One might ask why

or how it has happened. These things do not happen in a certain moment. They

happen so gradually that one never becomes aware of when, where, or how. The

civilized man has lost something because now we live in the man-made world where

it is almost impossible to find any sign of God. God is hard to find in the asphalt

roads or in cement structures. These things are not alive. How can one find God in

machines or in technology? Even facing the greatest machine you cannot feel awe,

you cannot feel reverence, and you cannot feel like falling on your knees and praying.

If you cannot feel like falling on your knees and praying even occasionally, how can

God remain a part of your being? Eliot proclaims that man is in front of a tremendous

flood of meaninglessness for the first time. Everything seems to be utterly irrelevant,

and the reason is simple: without God, there can be no significance, no magnificence.

Life can have meaning only in the milieu of something that surpasses life. The

meaning always comes from the background; now man stands without a context. The

meaning comes only when you can look upwards to something bigger than you can

can and something greater than you do.

When you feel connected with something greater, holier, your life has meaning.

Man has left nature and has created an artificial world of his own. This fact has been

the most devastating phenomenon, which has disrupted man from God, and all that is

difficult to understand in God: meaning, significance, majesty, love, prayer,

meditation, and all that is valuable. The irony is, man has never been as rich as he is

223

today. Both things have happened together: the inner, spiritual being has become

shoddier while the outer being has become more affluent. We have more money than

any other society before, we have in every way more power than any other society

ever had before, and lived in vanity. Eliot thinks that we have cultivated reason too

much and we have become unbalanced. Science functions from the head while

religion functions from the heart. Because we have become too obsessed with the

head, we think it is all. As we become more and more hung up in the head, we

become more and more oblivious to the existence of the heart, and Eliot thinks that

we will become more and more dejected. T. S. Eliot is right: ... something has

happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or

how, or where. Men have left God not for other gods... That was very usual in the

past; people used to move from one god to another. That was an evolution. The God

of Moses is less urbane than the God of Jesus, since there are thousands of years

between these two enlightened persons. Moses had to talk the language that could be

understood by his people, and those people were very primitive. Therefore, Moses

spoke in the language of law, commandments. By the time Jesus, arrived man had

evolved. Jesus talked about love, not about law. Love is a higher value than law. The

God of the Jews was a envious god and a very angry god; for small reasons he would

destroy cities. It was not really the god that was violent and angry, it was the people.

Their eyes were full of violence and anger; they could not see the real God. God is

always the same, but our vision changes. Jesus could see God as love and

compassion. Man was changing one god for another, for a higher conception of god.

224

In the past people had been changing gods: Men have left God not for other gods...

But in the present day something else has happened: Man has not left God for other

god. Man has dropped the whole idea of God, the whole idea of a divine presence in

existence. Now man is standing alone and is feeling empty. Man cannot remain

empty; it is difficult to remain empty. Therefore, a new trend is happening. According

to Eliot, man has created his own gods. Professing first Reason... -- and because man

cannot remain empty for long, he replaced it first with reason; reason became god.

However, reason is limited, it cannot prove many things. For example, it cannot prove

the beauty of a rose, but the beauty exists. Reason cannot prove the existence of love,

but love exists; reason is inadequate to prove it. Money also became god; millions of

people worship money as god. Power has become a god. The politician has become

the most important person in the world. We have denied God, but we cannot deny our

emptiness? We have rejected God, and we had to fill something in the empty space,

so we filled it with political power, with money, with reason, with race, with

dialectics. Man cannot live without religion. Man cannot live without God. If the true

God is not available, then man is bound to create homemade gods. The Church

disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, and what have we to do but stand

with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively

backwards? Yes, T.S. Eliot is right. In his poem, Choruses from ―The Rock,‖ Eliot

berates society for losing their faith in God and placing it in non-Christian symbols.

This is exactly the movement that will harm us all in the end. 61

Choruses: The

endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings

225

knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer

to our ignorance, all our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no

nearer to GOD. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we

have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?The

cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the

Dust. Though you forget the way to the Temple, There is one who remembers the

way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.You shall not deny the

Stranger 62

It shows how Eliot was trying hard to push men towards the God similar to

the teachings of the Bible. Following extract from The Rock chorus also reflects

Eliot’s worry for the civilization that did not give value to the God and the

church.

Much is your reading, but not the Word of GOD

Much is your building, but not the House of GOD,

Will you build me a house of plaster, with corrugated roofing,

To be filled with a litter of Sunday newspapers?

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened

before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has

never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing

226

first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or

Dialectic. What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms

turnedupwards in an age which advances progressively backwards? [TR]

Once again, we see Eliot trying to arouse the sleeping conscience of Christianity.

The church meant only for wedding ceremonies and wedding bells for them as in

general, no body had time in the contemporaray modern mechanized physical world

to go to the church and pray. Eliot belonged to a utilitarian church religious family.

These traits must have been inherited in him. He had a general tendency to preach

through his poetry, drama and prose. He had quoted enough references from the

holy Bible and the Indian philosophy to tell spiritually degraded humanity that

if they will not repent they will have a tragic end. They must ask god for

forgiveness and show their faith in God before it is too late. He wants his

contemporary modern civilization to realize that the worldly pleasures are just

transitory; it will end with death so prepare for salvation and eternal life.

227

Chapter V

References

1. Eliot, T.S. Murder in the Cathedral. London: Faber, 1935; New York: Harcourt,

Brace, 1935.P. 99.

2. Acts chapter 7, www.christiananswers.net/bible/acts7.html

3. Acts 6:11-14 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+6%3A11-14...

4. Peter 3:15 www.sermoncentral.com/bible/NIV/1-Peter-3.asp?passage...Peter.

5. cf. Ephesians 6:12-20

www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+6%3A12-20...

6. Matthew 10:23, www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+10%3A23.

7. Romans 6, 23; www.biblestudytools.com/esv/romans/6-23.html -

8. Isaiah 11:2-3, www.biblestudytools.com/isaiah/passage.aspx?q=isaiah+11:2-3

9. Cor. 11:31. bible.cc/1_corinthians/11-31.htm

10. Bowker 22

11. Eccl. 3:1, www. bible.cc/ecclesiastes/3-1.htm

12. Luke 24:36; John 20:19

www.biblegateway.com/passage/?...Luke+24%3A36%2CJohn+14%3A27%2CJo

hn+20%3A19%2CJohn

228

13. Luke 12:40 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+12...KJV

14. Matt. 4:1-3; Luke 4:1-4.

www.biblegateway.com/passage/?...Matthew...11%2CLuke

15. 2 Cor. 12:9www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Corinthians.

16. Matt. 16:19; 18:18-

www.biblegateway.com/passage/?Matthew+16%3A19%2CMatthew... -

17. John 14:27

18. Matt. 4:8-10; Luke 4:5-8

www.biblegateway.com/passage/?...Matthew...11%2CLuke

19. Matt. 4:5-7; Luke 4:9-12;

www.biblegateway.com/passage/?...Matthew...11%2CLuke

20. Gen. 4:7 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+4-7...NIV

21. Phil. 2:6 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians...11...

22. Heb. 5:4 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews

23. Romans 7:7 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+7

24. The Golden Legend;http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/goldenlegend/GL-

vol2-thomasbecket.html.

25. Luke 2:14 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+2%3A14

26. John 14:27 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+14%3A27

229

27. Luke 24:44-45; www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+2%3A14

28. The Catholic Encyclopedia; http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05394a.htm

29. Psalm 119:23 bible.cc/psalms/119-23.htm

30. Acts 7:60 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+7%3A60&version

31. Psalm 22:22 bible.cc/psalms/22-22.htm

32. John 1:1-2, www.biblegateway.com/passage/?...John...2%2CJohn.

33. Psalm 8:2 www.easyenglish.info/psalms/psalm008-taw.htm

34. Psalm 79:3 www.biblestudytools.com/psalms/79-3.html

35. Matthew 2:13-23 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew...23

36. Jeremiah 31:15 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah...NKJV

37. Heb. 5 http://classic.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+5%3

38. John 10 lds.org/scriptures/nt/john/10.16?lang=eng

39. Mark 12:17 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+12%3A17...

40. Ezek. 34, www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel+34

41. Psalm 23; bible.oremus.org/?passage=Psalm+23 -

42. John 10:11. www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10%3A11...

43. John 12:27ff www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+12%3A27

230

44. 1 Cor. 1:26-31; 2 Cor. 12:9.

www.biblegateway.com/passage/?...1+Corinthians...Corinthians...

45. The Catholic Encyclopedia; http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04721a.htm.

46. www.novelguide.com/.../metaphoranalysis.html -Dictionary of Symbolism

47. (Baugh, p. 1586)

48. Spender, Stephen. T. S. Eliot. (1975) p.199

49. Gardner, p. 153

50. http://studentacademichelp.blogspot.com/2009/03/work-of-art-is-by-its-very-

name-single.html#ixzz0x7wSSRuK

51. www.coursesindrama.comThe Plays of T.S.EliotCategory : Modern Drama: Ibsen

to Jean Genet, Published by Brian on 2008/3/1]

52. Thomas Stearns Eliot, Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed November 7, 2009.

53. Kermode, Frank. "Introduction" to The Waste Land and Other Poems, Penguin

Classics, 2003.

54. Perl, Jeffry M. and Andrew P. Tuck. "The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the

Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic Studies", Philosophy East & West V. 35 No. 2,

April 1985, pp. 116–131.

55. Eliot‘s lecture (the Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture at Harvard University)

was published as Poetry and Drama (Faber and Faber: London, 1951). NOTES 1

231

‗I was still inclined to go a Greek dramatist for my theme, but I was determined to

do so merely as a point of departure, and to conceal the origins so well that

nobody would identify them until I pointed them out myself. In this at least I have

been successful; for no one of my acquaintance recognized the source of my story

in the Alcestis of Euripides.‘

56. Gethin, Rupert (1998). Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford University Press.

ISBN 0-19-289223-1. p. 60

57. Eliot, T.S. The Cocktail Party. London: Faber, 1950; New York: Harcourt, Brace,

1950. p.187.

58. Geddes, Dan. The Cocktail Party – Eliot‘s Iceman Cometh Review

http://www.thesatirist.com/books/Cocktail_Party.html

59. Jacobs, Alan. TS-Eliot,-Vedanta,-and-Buddhism.ashx Review on "T.S. Eliot,

Vedanta, and Buddhism‖ http://advaita-academy.org/books/

60. Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot. London: Hamilton, 1984.

61. Murray, Paul .T.S. Eliot and Mysticism: The Secret History of Four Quartets.

Basingstoke: Mac Milan, 1991

62. The Rock: A Pageant Play. London: Faber, 1934; New York:

Harcourt, Brace, 1934.